This article contributes to the established scholarship on Sir William Jones (d.1794) by providing a detailed overview and analysis of the Arabic and Persian manuscript collection that Jones acquired both before arriving in India in 1784, and during his time living in Kolkata. 118 manuscripts in Arabic, Persian and Urdu and 69 Sanskrit manuscripts, as well as nine Chinese manuscripts, were transferred to the Royal Society library by Jones in 1792. These were then transferred to the India Office Library in 1876 and are currently housed in the British Library. As well as an in-depth survey of these manuscripts, this article provides important information on the manuscripts which remained in the Jones's possession after 1792 and which were sold, along with the rest of Lady Jones's (d.1829) library, at auction in 1831 after her death. Within this overview of the Arabic and Persian manuscript collections, there will be a sustained focus on the methods of acquiring manuscripts and Jones's curatorial management of his library.

The Burmese king popularly known today as “Kyanzittha”, reigned at Pagán from a.d. 1084 to 1112 or 1113. But his active career started much earlier than that: say from about 1050. The career divides itself sharply into REIGN and PRE-REIGN. He has left a dozen original stone inscriptions in Old Mon, some of great length; and these (thanks to the labours of my teacher, the late Dr. C. O. Blagden) are excellently edited and available in Epigraphia Birmanica. They cover merely the Reign. In them he hardly ever alludes to the Pre-Reign; and never once to the great predecessor whom he served so long, King Aniruddha.—In the late Chronicles, however, e.g. the Glass Palace Chronicle translation, six pages suffice to cover the reign—mostly fables, with slight resemblance to the original inscriptions. As for the Pre-Reign, there are 40 pages, also fabulous, full of mistakes and contradictions, but still of value.

In 305 B.C. Demetrius I Poliorcetes of Macedonia (r. 321–283), pursuing his ambition of reuniting the empire of Alexander, marched against the island city of Rhodes, which since the partition of 323 had been able to reassert its independence and pursue its own foreign policies. The ensuing siege, one of the most famous military campaigns of Hellenistic times, was a failure, and in 304 Demetrius was obliged to admit defeat and withdraw, leaving behind his siege train and large amounts of other military stores. The jubilant Rhodians gathered up this equipment and sold it for 300 talents, which, in gratitude for their deliverance, they used to commission a spectacular monument to the sun god Helios, the focus of a lively cult at Rhodes. The sculptor selected for the task was Chares, an artist from the town of Lindos (about 40 kilometres south of the capital) and a student of the renowned Lyssipus, who had recently erected a great bronze statue of Zeus at Tarentum in Italy.

Historians are agreed as to the importance of the fiscal institutions established in Upper India by Sher Shah (1540–1545), but their precise nature is not easy to discover. The difficulty lies mainly in the authorities available. All the published chronicles of the Afghan kingdom derive in effect from the Tārīkh-i Sher Shāhī of Abbās Sarwānī, and the text of this writer has not yet been worked out from the discordant manuscripts which have survived, so that it is not possible to be certain what the chronicler actually wrote in the few and tantalising passages which he devoted to the fiscal system. The only detailed study of the subject which I have seen is contained in Professor Kalikaranjan Qanungo's monograph entitled Sher Shah, which was published in Calcutta in 1921. In what follows I shall have to question some of the Professor's conclusions regarding the fiscal system established by his hero, and it is only fair to begin by saying that my criticisms do not apply to more than a very small proportion of his work. He has not, indeed, faced the problems presented by the text of the Tārīkh, and consequently his study cannot be regarded as definitive, but in the questions of chronology, topography, and psychology which occupy most of his pages he seems to me to have exercised a generally sound judgment along with great industry, and there are not many of his conclusions from which I would dissent.

This article is an attempt, in the nature of things tentative only, to carry a stage further the identification and location of the principal Sino-European works printed in China during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, as recorded by Henri Cordier in his L'Imprimerie Sino-Européene en Chine (Paris, 1901) and by Paul Pelliot in T'oung Pao (vol. xxiii, pp. 356–360) (Leiden, 1924). Considerations of space have obliged me to confine myself to a discussion of some ten of the most interesting of these, that is those which have the whole or the greatest part of the text printed in a European language. I therefore omit all those which have thetitle-page in Latin and the text in Chinese characters.

Paramārtha (a.d. 499–569), or Kula-nātha as he was sometimes called, was a Brahmin of the Bhāradvāja family of Ujjayinī, West India. In 539 a.d. the Emperor of China, Wu-ti (502–549), sent a mission to Magadha, North India, in search of a learned Buddhist and the original Mahā-yāna texts. The Indian Court despatched Paramārtha, who was then staying at Magadha, with 240 bundles of palm-leaf texts, besides 64 works which he afterwards translated.

Research undertaken recently at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs has resulted in the discovery of a number of fresh documents which throw light on the relations between Georgia and France in the early eighteenth century, and in particular on the journey to Versailles of Sulkhan Saba Orbeliani. The objects of this mission were to secure French intervention in favour of King Wakhtang VI of K'art'li, since 1712 detained by the Persian Shah at Isfahan, and to arrange for the dispatch of French missionaries to Western Georgia, whence the Theatines had been obliged to withdraw towards the end of the seventeenth century.

Like other Britons in colonial India, Sir William Sleeman had a poor opinion of the traditional holy men who still formed an important part of Indian society in the nineteenth century. Reflecting his writings on the suppression of the Thugs that would make him famous, Sleeman declared that, “There is hardly any species of crime that is not throughout India perpetrated by men in the disguise of these religious mendicants; and almost all such mendicants are really men in disguise”.1 None of these holy men were considered more dubious – more superstitious and reactionary – than the dervishes and faqīrs. In popular Indian usage the terms darwīsh and faqīr referred to a class of Muslim holy men who were considered to possess a range of miraculous powers, powers which served to demonstrate their proximity to God; and so in turn to underwrite their considerable authority.2 For many British officials, it was this authority that stood at the heart of what they saw as the faqīr problem. As the rumours that surrounded the various ‘mutinies’ of the nineteenth century demonstrate, faqīr s were seen as the perpetual ringleaders of rebellion and sedition. Nowhere were these concerns more insistent than in the circles of India's colonial armies, which more than any other aspect of colonial society relied on loyalty to a formalised and rational chain of command. Yet in spite (and in some ways because) of these fears, the commanders of the various armies under British command in India were anxious to demonstrate their respect for the autonomy of the religious rights of the Indian soldier. Through the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the Islam of ‘Jack Sepoy’ or the Indian soldier fell in between this tension of covert suspicion and official respect, and in different ways the careers of a series of Muslim holy men attached to the Muslim soldiers were shaped by this tension. Over the following pages, this essay examines the careers of three faqīr s connected to the Hyderabad Contingent, the army under British command in the nominally independent princely state of Hyderabad in South India, better known as the Nizam's State. Looking out from this princely corner of Britain's ‘informal empire’, the essay uses a number of forgotten small-town texts in Urdu to begin to reconstruct the religious history of the Indian soldier from the inside, as it were, and so to create an ethnohistory of Islam in the colonial armies of the British Empire.3

Chinese perfumery arts have a history of two or three thousand years. The art however, was never specifically separated from medicine, personal grooming or food culture; many aromatic materials were used for all of these purposes. In comparison to western traditions it is notable that Chinese perfumery was local in character. The aromatic raw materials employed were often native to Chinese lands, or imported from nearby. Moreover, Chinese perfumery differs from the western tradition in regard to the way in which a few outstanding aromatics have been employed.

A new copperplate inscription of Vainyagupta, to be presented in this article, is important as one of the rare sources that provide a glimpse of the later history of the Ājīvikas. It also tells us about their worship of Maṇibhadra, one of the eminent yakṣas, with interesting information on his iconography. Finally, it gives us some insights into the early history of Samataṭa, a subregion of Bengal on its eastern fringe, as it includes a copy of the grant of an earlier king named Nāthacandra. In this article, I will present an edition of the inscription and discuss some historical aspects revealed by it in connection with other sources.

Between 1922 and 1953, the German-Dutch Catholic Congregation Societas Verbi Divini, SVD, also known as the Divine Word Missionaries or Steyl Missionaries, sent approximately 90 missionaries to Northwest China. During these three decades, the Divine Word Missionaries established some 30 missionary stations (plus about 100 out-stations) in Gansu, Qinghai and Xinjiang.

‘Krishna and Rukmini’ is the title of Amar Citra Kathā comic vol. 516, with artwork by Pratap Mulick. The front page has a muscular Kṛ⋅ṇa gallantly helping an entranced lady mount his chariot. Or is he that gallant? A closer look reveals that Kṛ⋅ṇa is actually grabbing her by the wrist; yet the lady seems more than willing, she is coquettishly lifting her skirt as she mounts the vehicle, and her eyes look adoringly, somewhat naively, at her hero as she smiles coyly. The only hint of opposition is in the background where we see angry mustached warriors coming after them. Is this a case of abduction, or is it better called an elopement?

Anyone familiar with classical Japanese literature cannot but be struck by the rich array of terms such as mono no aware, yugen, wabi and sabi, to mention just a few, which are regarded as being central to the understanding of Japanese artistic theory and practice. These categories were not, of course, essentialist and unchanging. They were dynamic concepts which were subject to major transformations. These transformations illuminate important aspects of Japan's cultural history.

The palmleaf manuscript containing the text of the Prajñâpâramitâ-piṇḍลrtha by Dinnâga was found in the monastery of Žalu which I visited in autumn 1939. It consists of three leaflets without indication of any date. This small book is an epitome of the Aṣṭasâhasrikâ-prajñâ-pâramitã and it is intended to classify the arguments expounded in this treatise and to adapt its long repetitions to the logic of a rational and intelligible scheme.

Evidence about the ridda of Kinda is as mottled as it is for other events which Islamic historiography includes under the title of ridda. Tendentious writing and apologetics, contradictions and a complete lack of dates make the historian's task very hard indeed. Yet there is much that can be established (with varying degrees of probability) about those sanguinary events. Since no meaningful study of the short though eventful period of the ridda alone is possible, several related topics are also discussed below.

The question of the Arabian influence on the music of Western Europe has been considerably stressed of recent years. In the practical art, the minstrel class of the Middle Ages not only adopted the actual instruments of the Arabs, such as the lute ('ūd), rebec (rāb), guitar (kaithār), and others, but also the actual musical devices of the performers on them. In the theoretical art, clues in the Mediaeval Latin treatises on music enable us to follow a track which leads us to the conclusion that the teachings and writings of Arabian or/and Mozarabian theorists of music also had some influence on the theory of music of Western Europe.

1. The ancient Semitic poem here presented is inscribed in alphabetical cuneiform upon a clay tablet unearthed in 1933 at Ras esh-Shamrah (ancient Ugarit) on the north coast of Syria. The tablet dates approximately from the fifteenth-fourteenth century b.c. The text was first edited by M. Charles Virolleaud in the periodical Syria, xvii (1936), pp. 209–228, but the present interpretation differs toto cælo from that proposed in the editio princeps.

Every schoolboy and schoolgirl in India, figuratively speaking, is taught the Myth of Macaulay's Minute. According to this myth, attitudes of lofty condescension towards India's peoples and their inferior cultures, combined with practical needs for a cheap labour force to supply the manpower requirements of an enormous bureaucratic machine, prompted alien rulers to impose an English language educational system upon the subcontinent and, thereby, to neglect and stifle the natural growth of indigenous educational institutions. Moreover, in its more extreme forms, this myth assumes that these rulers were also either racially arrogant or wilfully ignorant, or both. Finally, this myth assumes that the disastrous consequences of this “colonialist” fiat were a major factor inhibiting the progress and well-being of a large proportion of India's peoples.